Architectural Flops

Once a month, if we’re lucky, Penn Prof Witold Rybczynski leaves his office and slides us an authoritative SLATE slide essay on the state of our architecture. This month’s is “Wit-tishly” entitled “Nice Try: The East Building, Avery Fisher Hall, Falling Water, and other ambitious architectural failures”, which is to say a professional sneer at “pros” who attempted their unsuccessful experiments on a construction site instead of in an academic lab. “Buildings sometimes fail,” he alleges,”because of incompetence or shoddy workmanship, but the examples that follow failed for a different reason: architectural ambition.”

The East Wing’s Tennessee marble cladding failed, according to Wall Street Journal speculation, because its joints were too thin to allow for the marble to expand. All 16,200 loose panels must be replaced at a cost of $85 million after only 30 years. Architect I.M.Pei also goofed on the windows of the sixty story Hancock Building in Boston. Panes popped out to be covered temporarily by plywood sheets at a discouraging rate. It was taunted as “Ply in the Sky”. (I used to refer to him as I.M. (a) Pane.) The problem was not the wind. The outside mirrored layer (for esthetic effect) heated up differently from the inner sheet. Pop went the difference!

When I went to China to study Mandarin in 1982, another architecture critic from Connoisseur and I spent a night in his new Pleasant Hills Hotel outside Beijing. We were amazed to discover that I.M. Pei, his wife and his daughter had just spent hours on their knees replacing the tiles incompetent Chinese workers had installed. Pei had just come from the Paris opening of his luminous Louvre glass pyramid where then French craftsmen had done their job superbly.

In 1929 Corbusier opened a Salvation Army hostel in Paris which he planned to use seasonal air conditioning of hot or cold air with exterior walls of double glass. Even though Carrier air condition had been a success in Pittsburgh three decades before, Europe wasn’t yet up to it. It was so intolerably hot the first summer the public health authorities insisted on openable windows.

When I made a pious odyssey of Corbu’s work during the centennial of his birth, I found that his first modern house he clad in concrete. Alas, it couldn’t endure the temperature differentials in Vevey on Lac Le Man. Ominous cracks had to be covered with aluminum sheets. (This puzzled his parents for whom it was made!)

Later in the same lookaround I was serendipitously given free run of his Maison d’Habitation in Marseilles when a lady with a baby heard me chatting with the elevator operator. She explained that most inhabitants had rejected his “liberating” mezzanines. They built over an extra floor. The originals were dubbed “pas prolonge”, the changed “prolonge”. She lived in a “pas”, her mother-in-law across the hall in a “prolonge”. That would been my choice!

“Fallingwater”(1937) is, warts and all, my favorite building in all the world. When Frank Lloyd Wright showed his client, Edgar J. Kaufmann, the department store magnate, his drawings, the businessman was nervous about the gorgeous cantilevered rooms. When he politely asked Wright to let his engineers check his math, our genius was outraged. Ahem. In 2002 ultrasonic testing revealed that Falling Water would soon be falling in the water of Bear Run. Estimated repair costs range from $11 to 23 millions!

And that’s not the only goof. Wright was a peewee who faked height with high rise shoes and porkpie hats. When I first visited Falling Water on a glorious June day on my way to the AIA Convention in Cincinnati in 1980, I was puzzled that I, no giant at 5’8”, had to stoop to get through his doors! That arrogant genius had made himself the module. Further, this man who insisted the hearth is the heart of the home had made the cookpot too large to ever heat any food. (I call it his “crackpot.” And the crane, in any case, to swing it over the fire didn’t swing. Oh, Frank.

There are more sad tales. Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe 33 high rise apartments (1950) blasted to earth in fewer than 30 years. But their cause was racism and poverty, not architectural hubris. Poor Minoru, my Detroit hometown hero, whose World Trade Centers also got the axe of history.

Max Abramowitz’s Avery Hall at the Lincoln Center still doesn’t sound right. And the Pompidou Centre looked good at first, but is petering out shamefully. But the two Main Culprits of modern American architecture, Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, I leave to Judge Rybcynski.

I can’t resist repeating my favorite flop story, Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia in Helsinki. Doing another sacred centennial gig in 1998, I was stunned to find on my ritual Sunday hike around the symphony hall that all its travertine cladding had been removed. Is that a way to celebrate a Centennial I asked the first hard hat I met. “Heh,” he replied, “travertine can’t take Finnish winters. And shards are falling off and hitting tourists. Can’t have that!”

He explained that granite would suffice, but the sentimental Finns are giving him thicker slabs and better adhesives, realizing in a decade or so they’d be shelling out several more millions just to keep Aalto’s ghost quiet. I walked back to my hotel, loving those damned sentimental Finns more by the kilometer.

After breakfast, I trekked out to the Finnish Architectural Museum to savor the retrospective of his achievements. The epigraph endeared me even more to Alvar: NEVER FORGET: ARCHITECTS MAKE MISTAKES! Hear that Franks (Wright and Gehry)?